Ancient Shores

10

In the morning, a horde of volunteer workers crowded into the auditorium at the Fort Moxie City Hall. The press was represented by Jim Stuyvesant, the town’s gray eminence and the editor and publisher of the weekly Fort Moxie News. Stuyvesant didn’t know much about why there had been a call for workers, other than that there was going to be an excavation on Johnson’s Ridge, but in a town where the news was perpetually slow, this was front-page stuff.

At eight sharp April tapped her microphone, waited for the crowd to quiet, and thanked everyone for coming. “We don’t know much about this structure,” she said. “We don’t know how durable it is, and we don’t know how valuable it is. Please be careful not to damage anything. We aren’t in a hurry.” Stuyvesant, who was his own photographer, took some pictures. “If you find anything that’s not rock and dirt, please call a supervisor over.”

“Is it Indian stuff?” asked a man in a red-checked jacket up front.

“We don’t know what it is.” April smiled. “After you help us find out, we’ll let you know. Please stay with your team. Tomorrow you can report directly to the work site. Or come here if you prefer. We’ll have a bus leaving at eight and every hour after that, on the hour, until two P.M. We’ll quit at four-thirty. You can quit when you want, but please check out with your team leader. Unless you don’t care whether you get paid.”

The audience laughed. They were in a good mood—unexpected Christmas money was coming, and the weather was holding.

“Any questions?”

“Yeah.” One of the students. “Is there going to be something hot to drink out there?”

“We’ll have a van dispensing coffee, hot chocolate, sandwiches, and hamburgers. Hot chocolate and coffee are on the house. Please be careful about refuse. There’ll be containers; use them. Anyone caught littering will be asked to leave. Anything else?”

People began buttoning parkas, moving toward the doors.

They poured out of the old frame building and piled into buses and cars and pickups. Stuyvesant took more pictures and waited for April. “Dr. Cannon,” he said, “what actually is on the ridge?”

“Jim,” she said, “I honestly don’t know, and I don’t want to speculate. It’s probably just an old storage facility from the early part of the century. Give me a few days and you can come look at it.”

Stuyvesant nodded. The Fort Moxie News traditionally reported stories that people wanted to see printed: trips to Arizona, family reunions, church card parties. He was therefore not accustomed to people who dodged his questions. He had an additional problem that daily newspapers did not: a three-day lead time before the News hit the street. He was already past the deadline for the next edition. “I can’t believe anybody would put a storage shed on top of a ridge. It’s a little inconvenient, don’t you think?”

“Jim, I really have to go.”

“Please bear with me a minute, Dr. Cannon. You’re a chemist, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Why is a chemist interested in an archeological site?”

April had not expected to be put under the gun. “It’s my hobby,” she said.

“Is there an archeologist here somewhere? A real one? Directing things?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, no. Not really.”

“Dr. Cannon, several weeks ago somebody dug up a yacht in the area. Is this project connected with the yacht?”

“I just don’t know,” April said, aware that she was approaching incoherence. “Jim, I’m sorry. I have to go.” She saw Max, waved, and started toward him.

But Stuyvesant kept pace. “There’s a rumor it’s a UFO,” he said.

She stopped and knew she should think before she said anything. She didn’t. “No comment,” she blurted out.

It was, of course, among the worst things she could have said.

They rented three vans: one to use as a kitchen, the second to serve as a control center, and the third to be a general-purpose shelter. They also erected a tent in which to store equipment.

Max had established himself at the Northstar Motel in Fort Moxie. He called Stell to tell her he’d be staying near the site for several days and asked her to arrange to get his car delivered so he would have local transportation.

Lasker agreed to take over the administrative aspects of the dig. He wasted no time designing an overall plan, appointing supervisors, devising work teams and assigning them rotating responsibilities, and putting together a schedule that allowed the workers almost as much time in shelter as exposed to the elements.

He also thought nothing of throwing a few spadefuls of earth himself. His attitude caught on, especially when April and Max joined in. Consequently, things happened quickly. And on the same day that the Fort Moxie News hit the stands with its UFO story, Lem Hardin, who worked part-time at the lumberyard, broke through to a hard green surface.

The story was picked up immediately by the major wire services.

Max’s first intimation of the breakthrough came with a loud round of distant cheers. He got up from his desk and was reaching for his coat when the phone rang. “The roof,” Lasker told him.

The word passed quickly around the site, and people scrambled up ladders and dropped wheelbarrows to hurry over to see. What they saw, those who could get close enough, was a small emerald-colored patch protruding out of the dirt at the bottom of a ditch.

April was already there when Max arrived. She was on her knees, gloves off, bent over the find. Max climbed down beside her.

“Feels like beveled glass,” she said. “I think I can see into it.” She took out a flashlight, switched it on, and held it close to the patch. But the sun was too bright. Dissatisfied, she removed her jacket and used it to create shade.

“What is it?” asked one of the workers.

“Can’t tell yet.” April looked at Max. “The light penetrates a little bit.”

“You’re going to freeze,” he said. But he put his head under the spread jacket. He could see into the object.

April produced a file, took off a few grains, and put them in an envelope. Then she looked up and spotted Lasker. “Be careful,” she said. “We don’t want any spades near it. I don’t care if it takes all year to get the dirt out. Let’s not damage this thing.” She put her jacket and gloves back on and climbed out of the hole. “Don’t know, but that doesn’t look to me like the roof of a shed. Maybe we’ve really got something.” The envelope was the self-sticking kind. She sealed it and put it in a pocket. “Max,” she said, “I need a favor.”

“Name it.”

“Fly me back to Colson?”

“The action’s here.”

She shook her head. “Later it will be. But this afternoon the action will be at the lab.”

April never understood how the media found out so quickly. The Ben at Ten TV news team arrived before she and Max could get off the escarpment, and they were quickly joined by some print reporters.

“No,” she told them, “I don’t know anything about a UFO.”

She told them she had no idea how the story had got started, that they weren’t looking for anything specific, that there’d been reports of a buried object atop the ridge, and that they had found some thick glass in the ground. “That’s it,” she said. “It’s all I can tell you for now.”

Carole Jensen from Ben at Ten pressed for a statement.

“How about tomorrow morning?” said April. “Okay? Nine o’clock. That’ll give us a chance to try to figure out what we’ve got. But please don’t expect any big news.”

Max flew them back to Chellis Field. April wasted no time jumping into her car, declining his invitation for lunch. “I’ll call you when I have something,” she promised.

Max checked in at the office, ordered pizza, and turned on his TV just as the noon news reports were coming on. And it was not good. There he was, standing beside April and looking foolish, while she transparently dodged questions. Worse, the reporter identified him as the owner of Sundown Aviation.

The anchor on The News at Noon referred to the delusions often associated with UFO buffs, and cited a gathering two weeks earlier on an Idaho mountaintop to await the arrival of otherworldly visitors. “Is the Fort Moxie dig another example?” he asked. “Stay tuned.”

In midafternoon the clips showed up on CNN, which lumped Johnson’s Ridge in with a report on the crazy season. They interviewed a visibly deranged young man who maintained there was a power source within the Pembina Escarpment that allowed people to get in touch with their true selves. In Minnesota a group of farmers claimed to have seen something with lights land in the woods near Sauk Centre. There were stories of alien abductions in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. And a man in Lovelock, Nevada, who’d crashed into a roadside boulder and tested positive for alcohol, swore he was being chased by a UFO.

“Max, you’re a celebrity,” Ceil told him. He hadn’t seen her standing in the doorway. She was wearing an immaculately pressed Thor Air Cargo blazer, dark blue with gold trim. Her hair was shoulder-length, and it swirled as she pulled the door shut.

Max sighed. “On my way to fame and fortune,” he said.

She sat down opposite him. “I hope you make it.” Her expression was set in its whimsical mode. “I was down looking at the Zero today.”

“And?”

“If you really have a UFO up there, the rest of this stuff is going to look like pretty small potatoes.”

He grinned. “Don’t bet the mortgage on it.”

“I won’t, Max.” She smiled. Max felt warmth flood through him. “Listen, I’m going up to Winnipeg. You busy?”

He shook his head. “Just waiting for a phone call. How long are you going to be there?”

“Up and back. I’m delivering a shipment of telecommunications parts.” Her eyes went serious. “Max, is it really there?”

“I doubt it,” he said.

She looked disappointed. “Pity. Anyhow, why don’t you come along? You can show me where you’re digging.”

Max saw himself coming out of a Washington studio after an interview with Larry King. Ceil would be waiting, but as she approached he would wave her away. “Talk to you later,” he’d say. “I’m on my way over to do the Tonight show.”

“Max?” she said.

“Yeah. Sure, I’ll go.” He did want to hear April’s results as soon as they became available. “Which plane?”

“Betsy.”

“Okay. Let me finish up here and I’ll meet you outside.”

He called April, got her answering machine, and told her how to raise the C—47. Then he left a note for Stell (who was at lunch), pulled on his jacket, and wandered out onto the runway.

Ceil was already on board. He could see her up in the cockpit, going through her checklist. The C—47 still carried its original insignia. The only external concession to its real mission was the corporate mallet and the legend Thor Air Cargo tucked away on the tail.

Max climbed in through the cargo door and closed it. The interior was filled with packing cases. He threaded his way through to the cockpit. Ceil, talking to the tower, raised a hand to acknowledge his presence. Max took the copilot’s seat.

The engines were turning slowly.

“What’s the big rush on the telephones?” he asked. Usually he would have expected a shipment like this to go by land.

“Somebody screwed up. Production is waiting. So I get the assignment. Most of my business comes from picking up the pieces when people get things wrong.” She grinned. “I’ll never lack for work.”

She taxied out onto the north runway. A few clouds floated in a gray sky. Snow tonight, Max thought. He liked the feel of the C—47. It was a durable and exceptionally stable aircraft. If you were going to haul cargo through hostile skies, this would be the plane you’d want to have.

“On our way,” she said. She gunned the engines, and the C—47 rolled down the tarmac and lifted into the early afternoon.

Max had discovered more than a year earlier that romance with Ceil wasn’t going to happen. Once that had been got out of the way, he found her easy to talk to. She was a good listener, and he trusted her discretion absolutely. “What scares me,” he said, “is that all this is becoming so public. The whole country now thinks that we think there might be a UFO up there. It makes us look like kooks.”

“What do you think?”

“That it’ll turn out to be something else.”

“Then why are you going to all this expense?”

Max thought about it. “On the off chance—”

Her laughter stopped him. “See? You are kooks. Anyhow, I wouldn’t worry about it. You’ll be fine if you really do have a UFO.” It was cold in the cabin, and she turned up the heat. “If it’s there, Max, I want to ride in it.” She looked at him, and he laughed and gave her a thumbs-up.

She climbed to fourteen thousand feet and turned north. Life was good in the cockpit of the C—47, where the sun was shining and everything was peaceful. “Who would own it?” she asked.

“I guess it would belong to the Sioux.”

“The Sioux?”

“It’s on their land.” The thought of the Sioux winding up with the world’s most advanced spacecraft amused him. “I wonder what the Bureau of Indian Affairs would say to that.”

“You can bet your foot,” she said, “that the Sioux wouldn’t be allowed to keep it.”

They picked up the Maple River near Hope and followed it north. When they were over Pleasant Valley, the phone rang. Ceil picked it up, listened, and handed it to Max.

It was April. She sounded out of breath. “It’s one-sixty-one, Max,” she said.

“Just like the boat?” He squeezed the phone and caught Ceil’s eye. “You’re sure?”

“Yes, Max. I’m sure.” She made no effort to suppress her delight.

“Congratulations,” said Max. Ceil was watching him curiously.

“You, too. Listen, we should go back up.”

“Actually, I’m more or less there now. I’m on my way to Winnipeg. I’ll be back this evening, and we can fly up tonight. Okay?”

“Sure. That’s fine. Call me when you get here.”

Max said he would. “Have you thought about the press conference tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve thought about it.”

“Seems to me we have no reason to keep it quiet anymore.”

“What?” asked Ceil, forming the word with her lips.

Max could almost hear the wheels go round in April’s head. “I’d feel better,” she said, “if we waited until we have the thing dug up.”

“You probably won’t have that luxury.”

“I take it,” Ceil said moments later, “you have a UFO.”

“No, the news is not that good. But it is good.” He explained.

She looked at him, and her eyes grew round and warm. “I’m happy for you, Max,” she said.

Johnson’s Ridge was coming up. Max looked down on the flanking hills, smooth and white in the afternoon sun, and the saddle, low and flat and emptying off abruptly into space.

“You’ve got a lot of people down there,” said Ceil.

Too many, as a matter of fact. There were people everywhere, and the parking lot overflowed with vehicles. “I guess we’ve got some sightseers,” he said.

Ceil banked and started a long, slow turn. “It’s probably just the beginning,” she said. “You might want to start thinking about crowd control and security.” She extracted a pair of field glasses from a utility compartment and raised them to look at the ridge. “I don’t think your people are getting much work done.”

Max reached for the phone, but she touched his wrist. “Why don’t we do it in person?” she said. “I’d like to see it for myself, anyhow.”

She put the glasses down and pushed the wheel forward. The plane began to descend. “You aren’t going to land down there, are you?” Max asked. “There’s an airport a few miles east.”

She pointed down. “Is that the road?”

The two-lane from Fort Moxie looked like stop-and-go traffic. “That’s it.”

“We don’t have time to negotiate that. Look, Max, I’d love to see a UFO up close. You’ve seen the ground. Any reservations?”

The top of the escarpment was about two thousand yards long. It was flat, treeless as long as she stayed away from the perimeters, marked with occasional patches of snow. “You’ve got a pretty good crosswind,” he said.

She looked down, and her expression indicated no sweat. “It’s less than twenty knots. No problem for Betsy.”

“Whatever,” he said.

She laughed. “Don’t worry, Max. If anyone complains, I’ll tell them you protested all the way down.”

Ten minutes later she set the big plane on the ground without jostling the coffee. Everyone turned to watch as they taxied close in to the site. Lasker was waiting when Max opened the door.

“I should have known it was you,” he said. Before he could say anything else he saw Ceil, and he got that same goofy expression that seemed to afflict every man she got close to.

“Ceil,” Max said, “this is Tom Lasker. Our straw boss.”

They shook hands.

Tourists and sightseers were everywhere. They engaged workers in conversation, blocked bridges, and generally got in the way. Many were standing on the edge of the excavation, others were dangerously close to the precipice. “We need to do something,” Max said.

Lasker sighed. “I had some people trying to keep them away. But they’re aggressive, and there are just too many to control. Anyway, nobody up here has any real authority.”

Max watched an unending stream of cars approaching across the top of the plateau. “Okay,” he said, “we’ll ask the police to establish some controls on the access road. Maybe limit the number of tourists they allow up here at any one time.”

“They don’t want to do that.”

“They’re going to have to. Before somebody gets killed. We’ll need to make up ID cards for our people.”

“What do we do in the meantime? We’re almost at dead stop here.”

Max took a deep breath. “Send everyone home early.” He looked at the swarms of people. “Who’s the chief of police?”

“Emil Doutable.”

“Do you know him?”

“Yeah. We don’t run in the same social circles, but I know him.”

“Call him. Explain what’s happening and ask for help. Tell them we’ve been forced out of the excavation, and ask him to send some people to clear the area.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

“Meantime,” Max said to Ceil, “I guess you’d like to see the whatsis?”

“Yes,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”

They crossed a wooden bridge over the main trench. In the inner area, heaps of dirt were thrown up everywhere, and several other ditches had been dug. Max peered into each as they advanced. Finally he stopped. “Here,” he said.

The excavation was wider than it had been in the morning. And the green patch had also grown. “It looks like glass,” Ceil said.

Several minutes later, Lasker rejoined them. “Cops are coming,” he said.

“Good. By the way, Tom, April says this is more of the same stuff. Maybe we’ve really got ourselves a UFO.”

Lasker shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Max had been careful not to allow himself to get carried away by his hopes. But Lasker’s comment, and something in his tone, disappointed Max. “Why not?” he asked.

Lasker looked pained. “Follow me,” he said.

He led the way back to the main ditch and descended one of the ladders. Max and Ceil followed. It was cold and gloomy in the trench. Boards had been laid along the ground. People were digging everywhere. Others hauled dirt away and loaded it into barrels. The barrels were lifted by pulley to the surface, where they would be dumped.

“Here,” said Lasker. He pointed at a curved strut that emerged from the earthen wall about five feet over his head and plunged into the ground. “There are several of these,” he said. “The upper end is connected to the outside of the object. This end,” he added, pointing to the lower section, “is anchored in rock. Whatever else this thing might be, it sure as hell wasn’t meant to go anywhere.”